Early Christianity in North Africa (review)

Edward L. Smither has done a great service in translating François Decret's 1996 Le christianisme en Afrique du Nord ancienne, which provides a brief but reasonably comprehensive survey of the development of Christianity in Roman Africa from its beginnings through its unrecorded death by suffocation under the weight of Islamic civilization, perhaps as late as the eleventh century.

After an introductory study of the Phoenician and Roman contributions to the organization and urbanization of the area, the narrative devotes a chapter to the origins of Christianity in the second and first part of the third century, relying on martyrdom narratives, archeological evidence of Christian burials, and the writings of Tertullian. Three chapters are then dedicated to the third century, detailing the conflicts with the Roman state in the mid-century persecutions, the development of church organization, and the elaboration of Cyprian's ecclesiology. The seventh chapter, the longest and perhaps most useful contribution of the book, provides a detailed account of the division of the Donatists from the Catholics and the schisms within the Donatist movement in the late fourth century. A survey of the other religious traditions—traditional Roman practice, Judaism and Manichaeism—at the end of the fourth century prepares for the study of Augustine, which is focused on the Pelagian controversy, the reformation of the African church under Aurelius, and the complex dealings of the African bishops with the Roman church and the imperial government. The final chapter sketches the Vandal and Byzantine occupations and the Arab conquest, using archeological evidence to date the end of African Christianity. The text is supplemented by two maps, a chronological table, an index, and the bibliography of the original French edition, which is largely in that language.

A reader familiar with the primary sources will recognize that Decret is pushing the available evidence to its limit, and occasionally beyond. Some of the reconstructions—the organization of local churches as burial societies (17f.)—are compatible with, but not established by, the evidence. Others have been disputed as misinterpretations of the meager indicators on which they are built—the origins of the persecution around 202 in Severus's trip to Palestine (23) and the sequence of Tertullian's ecclesial affiliations (40f.). A few, such as the estimating of the general and Christian populations of Africa in the first part of the fifth century at six and two million respectively (144) can only be based on speculation. The assertion that Carthage was glutted with five hundred clergy in 430 (183) is misleading at best. The primary limitation of this study, however, is the sparse referencing of the evidence for these assertions. The judgments offered in the chapter on Donatism, in particular, makes this reader suspect that it was written on the basis of secondary literature rather than primary sources, even as J. L. Maier has made these so easily accessible in Le dossier du Donatisme. The general reader is induced to believe that a great deal is known with certainty; more suspicious academic users cannot identify and evaluate sources of Decret's information that they may have overlooked.

With the proper caution, however, this volume can be quite useful. Decret attends to the interaction of Christian and imperial culture throughout the narrative. The complexity of Tertullian and Augustine's appreciation of the Roman Empire is well developed. That Tertullian and Cyprian, as well as some bishops in the early fourth century, continued to enjoy the assistance and even protection of influential non-Christians shows that even in time of persecution, the bonds of family and friendship held firm. Cyprian's understanding of the episcopate and the independence of the local bishop and Augustine's quarrel with the Pelagians are both well explained.

Smither's translation of the French is readable and accurate. He uses existing English translations of the extended Latin passages cited by Decret. The few errors and infelicities occur in short Latin phrases which Smither has translated himself. The French version is listed by Worldcat in...